Page 2 of
2 How
Pakistan makes US pay for Afghan
war By Dilip Hiro
The
main part of the NDN is a 3,220-mile (5,100
kilometer) rail network for transporting supplies
between the Latvian port of Riga and the Uzbek
town of Termez (connected by a bridge over the
Oxus River to the Afghan settlement of Hairatan).
According to the Pentagon, it costs nearly $17,000
per container to go through the NDN compared to
$7,000 through the Pakistani border crossings.
Moreover, US and NATO are allowed to
transport only "non-lethal goods" through the NDN.
Other military officials have warned that
the failure to reopen the Pakistani routes could
even delay the schedule for withdrawing American
"combat troops" from Afghanistan by 2014. That
would be bad news for the Obama White House with
the latest Washington Post/NBC News poll showing
that, for the first time, even a majority of
Republicans believe the Afghan war "has not
been worth fighting". A
CBS News/New York Times survey indicated that
support for the war was at a record low of 23%,
with 69% of respondents saying that now was the
time to withdraw troops.
In the Pakistani
capital, Islamabad, the PCNS finally published a
list of preconditions that the US must meet for
the reopening of supply lines. These included an
unqualified apology for the air strikes last
November, an end to drone attacks, no more "hot
pursuit" by US or NATO troops inside Pakistan, and
the taxing of supplies shipped through Pakistan.
Much to the discomfiture of the Obama
administration, a joint session of the National
Assembly and the senate called to debate the PCNS
report took more than two weeks to reach a
conclusion.
On April 12, parliament
finally unanimously approved the demands and added
that no foreign arms and ammunition should be
transported through Pakistan. The Obama
administration is spinning this development not as
an ultimatum but as a document for launching talks
between the two governments.
Even so, it
has strengthened Gilani's hand as never before.
Furthermore, he has to take into account the
popular support the Saeed-led Difa-e Pakistan
Council is building for keeping the Pakistani
border crossings permanently closed to NATO
traffic. Thus, Saeed, a jihadi with a US bounty on
his head, has emerged as an important factor in
the complex Islamabad-Washington relationship.
Squeezing Washington: The pattern There is, in fact, nothing new in the way
Islamabad has been squeezing Washington lately. It
has a long record of getting the better of US
officials by identifying areas of American
weakness and exploiting them successfully to
further its agenda.
When the Soviet bloc
posed a serious challenge to the US, the
Pakistanis obtained what they wanted from
Washington by being even more anti-Soviet than
America. Afghanistan in the 1980s is the classic
example.
Following the Soviet military
intervention there in December 1979, the Pakistani
dictator General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq volunteered
to join Washington's Cold War against the Kremlin
- but strictly on his terms. He wanted sole
control over the billions of dollars in cash and
arms to be supplied by the US and its ally Saudi
Arabia to the Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors) to
expel the Soviets from Afghanistan. He got it.
That enabled his commanders to channel a
third of the new weapons to their own arsenals for
future battle against their archenemy, India.
Another third were sold to private arms dealers on
profitable terms. When pilfered US weapons began
appearing in arms bazaars of the Afghan-Pakistan
border towns (as has happened again in recent
years), the Pentagon decided to dispatch an audit
team to Pakistan.
On the eve of its
arrival in April 1988, the Ojhiri arms depot
complex, containing 10,000 tons of munitions,
mysteriously went up in flames, with rockets,
missiles and artillery shells raining down on
Islamabad, killing more than 100 people.
By playing on Ronald Reagan's view of the
Soviet Union as "the evil empire", Zia also
ensured that the American president would turn a
blind eye on Pakistan's frantic, clandestine
efforts to build an atom bomb. Even when the CIA,
the National Security Agency and the State
Department determined that a nuclear weapon
assembled by Pakistan had been tested at Lop Nor
in China in early 1984, Reagan continued to
certify to congress that Islamabad was not
pursuing a nuclear weapons program in order to
abide by a law which prohibited US aid to a
country doing so.
Today, there are an
estimated 120 nuclear bombs in the arsenal of a
nation that has more Islamist jihadis per million
people than any other country in the world. From
October 2007 to October 2009, there were at least
four attacks by extremists on Pakistani army bases
known to be storing nuclear weapons.
In
the post-9/11 years, Pakistan's ruler General
Pervez Musharraf managed to repeat the process in
the context of a new Afghan war. He promptly
joined president George W Bush in his "war on
terror", and then went on to distinguish between
"bad terrorists" with a global agenda (al-Qaeda),
and "good terrorists" with a pro-Pakistani agenda
(the Afghan Taliban).
Musharraf's ISI then
proceeded to protect and foster the Afghan
Taliban, while periodically handing over al-Qaeda
militants to Washington. In this way, Musharraf
played on Bush's soft spot - his intense loathing
of al-Qaeda - and exploited it to further
Pakistan's regional agenda.
Emulating the
policies of Zia and Musharraf, the post-Musharraf
civilian government has found ways of diverting US
funds and equipment meant for fighting al-Qaeda
and the Taliban to bolster their defenses against
India. By inflating the costs of fuel, ammunition
and transport used by Pakistan's 100,000 troops
posted in the Afghan-Pakistan border region,
Islamabad received more money from the Pentagon's
Coalition Support Fund (CSF) than it spent. It
then used the excess to buy weapons suitable for
fighting India.
When the New York Times
revealed this in December 2007, the Musharraf
government dismissed its report as "nonsense". But
after resigning as president and moving to London,
Musharraf told Pakistan's Express News television
channel in September 2009 that the funds had
indeed been spent on weapons for use against
India.
Now, the widely expected release of
the latest round of funds from the Pentagon's CSF
will raise total US military aid to Islamabad
since 9/11 to $14.2 billion, two-and-a-half times
the Pakistani military's annual budget.
There is a distinct, if little discussed,
downside to being a superpower and acting as the
self-appointed global policeman with a multitude
of targets. An arrogance feeding on a feeling of
invincibility and an obsession with winning every
battle blind you to your own impact and even to
what might be to your long-term benefit. In this
situation, as your planet-wide activities become
ever more diverse, frenzied, and even
contradictory, you expose yourself to exploitation
by lesser powers otherwise seemingly tied to your
apron strings.
Pakistan, twice during
America's 33-year-long involvement in Afghanistan
made a frontline state, is a classic example of
that. Current policymakers in Washington should
take note: it's a strategy for disaster.
Dilip Hiro, a TomDispatch
regular, is the author of 33 books, the most
recent being the just-published Apocalyptic
Realm: Jihadists in South Asia(Yale
University Press, New Haven and London).
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